The story:
My poor heep has seen many revisions of its suspension in the 6 years I've owned it. Starting with my custom sway bar discos, moving on to a 2.5" budget boost, up to 3.5" to clear 31s, new lower arms, booster springs and blocks to push up to 4.5" to clear the 32" MTRs and all the driveline mods that go along with it. In January the blocks decided that they were going to walk out from under the rear springs. Luckily I caught it before it actually spat one of them out. The solution to this problem was a set of 4.5" Rubicon Express rear leafs hooked up to my 1" drop shackles netting me 6.5" in the rear. I know the math doesn't work out, but Rubicons springs seem to be a little under rated. The problem was that now the a$$ end sat way up in the air. I knew that I was going to have to lift the front, but I figured it could wait. Well, I kept driving it and soon started noticing some new clunking noises from the front end. I shook the tires and realized that i had killed all 4 poly bushings on the lower arms, as well as 2 of the rubber bushings on the stock upper arms, and this was allowing the axle to move around almost 3/4" back and forth. Time to fix it, but as I always say, why fix it when you can upgrade it?

The reasoning:
I've wanted a long arm set up for several years now. I didn't really know why, I just thought it was awesome and the flex was amazing! After discovering that my front end needed some major attention I began to actually look into the long arm kits and what it is that they do. Turns out that they do a lot more than just give you tons of flex and look freakin' sweet. There is a ton of geometry that gets adjusted with these kits, and this does things like improve on road handling as well as correct wheel base and pinion angles. I looked at several kits including Rubicon, rock-krawler, Claytons offroad and TNT customs. It came down to Claytons or TNT due to the thicker materials as well as recommendations from other wheelers. I chose the TNT kit because of the relatively simple install, the beefy skid/crosmember, and the bent arm design, a feature unique to TNT, which gives you several inches of clearance that straight arms don't allow.

The install:
I know, blah blah blah, talk talk talk where the he!! are the pictures???? Well here they are. (Finally, Geeze!:asshat

I ordered the upgrade kit because I already had the brake lines, sway bar links, etc. So I got the belly pan, arms, hardware kit, springs, and a drop pitman arm. I also ordered the weld on frame stiffeners as part of the kit. They are the only part on this install that required any welding, everything else is 100% bolt on.

The belly pan/crossmember/Tcase skid.

Upper arms:

Lower arms:

Control arms painted:

Belly pan painted:

The next day the magical brown truck of happiness brought me the frame stiffeners so it was time to get those installed.

First all the undercoating/paint/rust/crap had to be ground off the frame:

I decided to use rosette welds as well as stitch welds to hold the reinforcements to the unibody, so I had our friend Kevin drill several 1/2" holes for the plug welds. Someday I hope to own a drill press with that many features!

Once prepped, you form the stiffeners to the unibody rail with a floor jack:

All ready to weld up!

Burn it home!

All done!
What i don't have pictures of is the upper stitch welds on that side and the paint.

You can see the old crossmember under there along with the complete lack of protection.

And me practicing "Jeep Yoga" Let me tell you it is a pain in the ass to drill 6 13/16" holes through a half inch of steel while laying on your back.

We didn't really get any pics of bolting it up, but basically once you drill the holes, you just insert the crush sleeves, hoist the thing up there, and tighten it down.

Just a photo of the old suspension before we removed it.

The next day we got to installing the arms. First step, remove the old lower arms.

Next step, cut off the old lower control arm mounts. Theres no going back now!

Then you remove the upper control arms, track bar, steering, shocks, and springs. Here's a comparison of the old spring with the coil spacer, and the new 6.5" RE springs.

At this point we ran into a problem. We had to get the steering disconnected from the pitman arm in order to get the drivers side spring installed, but there was no way to fit a puller up on top of the arm. I had a new pitman arm anyways, so we figured we'd just pull that off first. We tried my 2 arm puller, and it wouldn't budge. I heated it as much as I could with my propane torch. No dice. We bent my 2 arm, so we got my friends 3 arm puller and tried that. Still nothing. I even busted out the welder and ran a bead around the outside of the arm to heat it up red hot to try and break the bond. It finally popped off after a lot of persuasion.

We spent way too many hours on that though, and had to call it a night. Here was our progress on night 2.

The next morning I got the other spring in:

The pitman arms. You can see what I had to do to the old one to get it off.

The results:
I love the way that tis suspension rides. It just sucks up bumps and feels almost like the stock ride, just a lot higher. Even curbs and parking blocks seem to disappear into the suspension. I did the first 20 miles of freeway test at 55mph behind a milk truck in the right lane, and even though that lane is all torn up from the trucks, it is now tolerable in the jeep. Steve and I took it out and threw it around a bit, just to see how it would react to abrupt maneuvers and panic stops. I haven't thrown the jeep around like that in years, and it feels better than ever. Also, the tires don't rub on the arms anymore, so i got my turn radius back! I can u-turn on a 2 lane residential street! I would recommend this kit to anybody!!!http://www.tntcustoms.com

Nice write-up, good info regarding the TNT kit. I agree with the quality of handling regarding a top-shelf LA kit as opposed to short-arm bastard-ish kits, it's nice to not have to worry about it riding like it's on a bumpy rail.

2 things, are you going to be getting longer brakelines, or are you planning on running limit straps short enough to prevent tearing them out?

2nd, rock krawler also has bent arms, which are also solid stock, so the bent feature isn't unique to TNT.

I don't post on here much but read it all the time, so when I see a write up like this I got to give the guy a big thank you for taking all the time to post up and write up the project.
Your observations (criticism) is taken but man for crying out loud give the guy a big thanks for doing what he did first.

Great write up.
Got any pictures of it on flat ground?
I have the 4.5in RE springs in the back plus the RE1.75 shackle
and 4.5 in RE coils + 2in block in the front.. How do the 6.5 RE springs level with the back?

Thanks for all the positive responses. I thought somebody was going to notice that tight little brake line. That was actually the result of a trail repair after i sheered off one of my extended Rubicon lines in Death Valley. We has to limp the jeep out with just the e-brake to stop, and leave it at our camp spot while we took a second rig into Nevada to find a stock brake line to get me home. I have swapped in a new brake line there.

Second, I was unaware that rock krawler used a bent arm system. Is it part of their 3link setup? I didn't really want a 3link, so i didn't spend much time looking into them...

I agree that kevin should have been wearing safety glasses, and i honestly didn't even notice till just now that he wasn't. huh.

I don't have any pictures of it sitting flat yet, nor any pics of the custom swaybar endlinks we had to fab up. I will try to take some today if I get a chance. The swaybar was a must for my on-road, because we took it out for a test drive, and its so flexy that if i cornered hard it would lean over enough to unload the inside rear wheel and I'd loose traction. It also hooked into corners real bad. As for the springs, they level quite nice with my rear. I'm running the 4.5" rear leafs and a set of MJ shackles which give me about another inch. I have noticed that the Rubicon leafs gave me more like 5-6" depending on the weight in the back. With just my spare and my toolbox back there it is level enough for me!

Thanks for the write-up and pictures! Did you stich weld the top edge of the frame stiffeners? It's kind of hard to see in the pic of the finished rosette welds (or is that after the rosette welds and before welding the edges?)